Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  ‘And what kind of beast are you?’ she teases.

  ‘He’s mine,’ Scarwell hisses.

  He might be yours all winter, thinks Lily, but he’s mine the long sun nights of summer.

  But as Scarwell moves towards her, the firelight revealing all her battle scars and bloodstains, Lily backs away, remembering last summer when she and Wing watched a pair of she-wolves tear at each other’s throats.

  Scarwell and Mara, whispered Wing.

  Lily could only stare and wonder, thinking of her smiling mother now playing with the little ones, Corey and Coll, in the garden of the summer tree hut.

  Scarwell’s lips draw back from small, discoloured teeth in a silent snarl. ‘Go!’

  Lily edges towards the mouth of the cave. She halts and looks back at Wing as the pack outside slaver and whine, but he and Scarwell seem to be having a silent battle of wills.

  ‘We’re going on a – an adventure,’ Lily announces as a clumsy parting shot. ‘Tell her, Wing.’

  Scarwell shoots Wing a burning look. ‘Stay here. With me.’

  ‘He’s coming with me,’ Lily insists. ‘To the ocean.’

  She knows how Wing craves the sea, his first home. He tries to satisfy that craving every summer, living down by the water. But Lake Longhope is not the world’s seas.

  Scarwell draws in a breath as the ocean-hunger trembles all through Wing.

  ‘To . . . ocean?’ The wolfwoman turns to Lily with a dangerous smile. ‘Lily go find father?’

  Lily shrugs at the senseless comment, then hears a growl from Wing that is almost too low for human ears.

  ‘My father’s at home in Candlewood,’ Lily retorts, looking quizzically from one to the other.

  ‘Rowan?’ Scarwell’s smile is as sharp as a blade. ‘Rowan not Lily’s father.’

  THE FOX FATHER

  ‘Scar,’ hisses Wing.

  ‘Of course Rowan’s my father,’ Lily insists, bewildered, but a shiver of dread runs down her spine.

  ‘Your father,’ says Scarwell, ‘is across ocean. In sky city. Your father is Fox.’

  Her wind-scraped voice seems to reach inside Lily and rake at a long-buried hurt. Forgetting the wolves, Lily’s only thought is to get away from Scarwell and run for home. She darts for the mouth of the cave.

  ‘Lil! No!’

  Wing catches her arm, yanking her back into his protection as the pack outside the cave rises to its feet with an unearthly noise.

  ‘I want to go h—’

  Lily falters on the word, on the idea of home.

  She presses her face into Wing, overcome by a strange, unravelling fear. He and Scarwell are muttering to each other in their wild language; a throaty wolfspeak, barely human words that Lily cannot understand. But she knows some furious pact is being made.

  Scarwell strides to the entrance of her cave and lashes the pack with her voice. The wolves calm into sulky whimpers and slink away. Lily takes her chance. She breaks free from Wing’s grasp and rushes from the cave to scramble down the mountain, too desperate to escape to care about the bruising rocks. When at last she stumbles on to the boulders on the lake shore, she finds Wing is close behind. They face each other in the darkness, wrapped in clouds of steamy breath.

  ‘Rowan is my father,’ Lily bursts out. ‘What did Scar mean?’

  Wing’s silence fills her with a churning dread. But she has to know.

  ‘Who – who is Fox?’

  Wing takes her face in his hands and Lily reads in his eyes, in his touch, an answer he can’t give her in words.

  ON THE HINTERLAND

  Lily runs from Wing until the trees stop her, tripping her up on a knobbly root. She crashes on to the forest floor and sits up, spitting pine needles from her mouth – then is yanked to her feet by strong arms.

  ‘Found!’ says the familiar deep voice of Pollock, the hunter. He sniffs her hair and snorts. ‘Been with wolf-boy?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I don’t trust him or the wolfwoman,’ Pollock growls. But his eyes twinkle at her in the light of an approaching lamp. ‘You can come bear-trapping if you need some excitement.’

  The lamp makes a radiant circle in the dark forest and illuminates a worried face peering out from thick plaits of hair.

  ‘Lily!’ cries Molendinar. ‘Your mother’s been searching for you – we all have. Where have you been?’ She raises the lamp and groans at Lily’s defiant face. ‘Oh, let me guess. Wing is trouble, Lily. Best leave him to Scarwell.’ Mol shakes her head despairingly. ‘Thanks, Pollock, I’ll see her home. We’re not standing here in the freezing cold a moment longer. Back to your burrow, Lily Longhope!’

  Lily plants herself in front of Molendinar.

  ‘Why is my name Longhope?’ she asks.

  The question bursts from her, almost against her will.

  ‘It’s Mara’s name, of course,’ says Mol, grabbing Lily’s hand and pulling her through the trees.

  ‘But why don’t I have my fath—Rowan’s name?’

  ‘Your mother saved our people. You should be proud to have her name,’ Mol retorts.

  ‘But my brothers have Rowan’s name,’ Lily points out.

  ‘You have Mara’s name, they have their father’s,’ Mol says. ‘That’s fair, isn’t it?’

  Lily ponders that – and sees, in the glow of the lantern, the strange glance that shoots between Mol, her mother’s friend, and Pollock the hunter, as they push through the low-hanging branches of the pines.

  ‘So why didn’t you give your little Broom your name?’ Lily persists, as they reach the clearing in the forest that is the heart of Candlewood.

  Mol sets down her lamp on one of the log seats by the communal fire, struggling for an answer. The weary figures around the fire greet their arrival with relief.

  ‘Just like her mother,’ Mol exclaims, her patience breaking when she can’t seem to find an answer. ‘Trouble on two legs!’

  The others burst out laughing.

  ‘Now, now,’ Ibrox chides, handing Mol their squirming baby to feed. ‘All’s safe and sound.’

  ‘Without Mara’s troublemaking,’ Candlewood’s story-master, Gorbals, reminds Mol in a dry voice, ‘we’d still be stuck in the netherworld.’

  Some of the wild urchins once rescued from Wolf Mountain, tamer in nature now and grown, gather around Lily, drawn to the musky wolf scent on her skin, hair and clothes.

  ‘You saw Wing?’ Skye whispers enviously.

  ‘And Scarwell?’ asks Stroma, wide-eyed.

  ‘The wolves let you live?’ marvels Hoy.

  A soulful howl resounds through the forest. The men grab flaming sticks from the fire and stride towards the trees. Mol tucks her baby into her fur parka and pushes Lily towards one of the wooden doors set in the forest floor.

  ‘Burrow! Now! Before the wolves have us all for supper – go!’

  ‘I’m gone,’ Lily says, but she lingers till the wolfsong ends. Only the urchins, who grin at Lily as they jump into their burrows, have guessed that it’s only Wing.

  His goodnight call emboldens her as she lifts the door of her own earth burrow to descend into a warm fug of fire smoke and her mother’s furious blast of relief.

  THE EMBERS OF THE TRUTH

  Lily creeps down the wooden steps that lead into the heart of the burrow. She ducks the damp washing that hangs from a tree root and heads straight for her snug: a dug-out at the far end of the burrow, blocked by heavy deerskin drapes, to give her some blessed privacy.

  ‘Well?’ Mara steps in front of the snug, hands on hips, blocking Lily’s escape.

  ‘I’m tired,’ says Lily, avoiding her mother’s eyes.

  ‘Your father’s out looking for you. Where have you been?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ Lily mutters.

  She lifts the lid of the pot on the stone stove in the centre of the burrow, and wrinkles her face at the mush of leftover root stew.

  ‘I trusted you to go to the lake and straight back,’ says Mara. ‘If I find out you
were on Wolf Mountain with Wing, in the dark—’

  Lily slams the lid back down. ‘Tuck’s sake, can’t I have a life?’

  ‘Don’t use that curse in here,’ says Mara, edgily.

  ‘It’s just a word,’ Lily retorts. ‘Some dead person’s name.’

  Mara’s dark, steady gaze flinches at that.

  ‘It’s a name I don’t want to hear,’ she says firmly, after a pause.

  The burrow door rattles above them and Rowan bounds down the wooden stairs.

  ‘Back all in one piece then?’ He blows out a great sigh of relief, then glances from Lily to Mara, reading the fraught silence between them.

  ‘We were worried.’ Rowan puts a calm hand on Lily’s shoulder. ‘There are winter-starved wolves out there, you know that. What were you thinking?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about – about – if – if you’re . . .’ The words stutter out before she can stop them. ‘Who is Fox?’

  Rowan’s hand drops from her shoulder. Mara steps backwards, stricken. As soon as she’s spoken Lily wishes she could swallow her own words.

  No, she thinks. It isn’t true. It can’t be.

  One of her small brothers lets out a wail. Mara turns away and pulls back the fur curtain of the snug where the little ones sleep. She lifts the toddler to soothe him and as he wraps his arms and legs around his mother, Mara sinks her face into the blond curls that are so akin to Rowan’s.

  A thought slices through Lily. There is nothing about her that is like Rowan.

  She is akin to Mara in many ways: her quick-eyed curiosity and daredevil nature; her lithe limbs, even her hands and feet, down to the shape of her fingernails and toes. But the tawny waves that ripple down her back are nothing like the silky darkness of Mara’s hair. That belongs all to herself. Or so Lily thought.

  Bedtime,’ says Rowan, watching Lily with an expression she can’t read. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow. It’s the middle of the night and everyone’s tired and upset.’

  He gives Lily a hug, warm and tight as ever, and his usual goodnight kiss.

  Lily huddles into her nook of the burrow and listens to the moan of the wind in the trees above ground. Under the warm heap of bear furs her body surrenders to exhaustion, though her mind and thoughts whirl. But on the hinterland of sleep she hears Mara whisper; the first words she has spoken since Lily left for bed.

  ‘You heard what she said?’

  There is a long pause. Lily feels her scalp prickle.

  ‘I always told you it would come out,’ Rowan murmurs at last. ‘She was bound to hear something one day. We should have told her long ago.’

  The words bolt through Lily. Her eyes spring open.

  Not another word is said. There is only the hiss of the stove fire as it is dampened for the night and the sounds of Mara and Rowan preparing for bed. The burrow falls quiet and still.

  Lily stares into the darkness.

  Can it be true? That her real father is a stranger across the world’s ocean?

  She will not believe it. Rowan is her father. And they wouldn’t – they just couldn’t – have hidden such a thing from her all this time. If it were true, her whole life would be a lie.

  Yet she knows what she saw in Wing’s face, what he told her without words. A terrible truth shone in Scarwell’s eyes too. Didn’t she glimpse it again in the uneasy glance between Molendinar and Pollock, when Lily asked about her name? And she heard it just now in the strained whispers between the two people she thought were her parents.

  Does everyone else know? Even Scarwell? Everyone except herself?

  But Rowan is her dad. He must be. No father could be more loving. Lily thinks of the special tenderness between them that always makes her feel precious, different to his rough-and-tumble love of the boys. She always thought it was because she was his only daughter. A horrible dread engulfs her now as she wonders if that gentle love might be the care you give to something that doesn’t truly belong to you.

  Lily huddles deep into the bearskin and shuts her eyes tight. She never knew it was possible to feel so alone.

  SIGNALS IN THE SKY

  Lily rubs her cold nose and snuggles deeper under her fur quilt, trying to settle back to sleep. But something keeps niggling her, as if there’s a jaggy pine needle in her sock.

  It’s not a pine needle. It’s a painful, stabbing thought.

  Rowan is not my father.

  Lily wakens with a nasty jolt and stares into the darkness. After a while she throws off her quilt and creeps out of her snug into the main room of the earth burrow. Stepping over wooden toys, she hears the sleepy breaths and snores of her family behind the deerskin curtains of their snugs. Easing on her furred parka, as quietly as she can, she climbs up the wooden steps set steeply in the earth and pushes open the door in the forest floor.

  Outside, stars still prickle the tops of the pines. The night sky is lightening but the sun is not yet up. Lily avoids the other forest dwellers who are emerging from their burrows and runs towards the lake. Dawn mist tumbles down through the branches and when she reaches the end of the trees there is no lake or mountains, the world is blank. The mist keeps tumbling and it seems to Lily as if the sky is falling down.

  ‘Why did you never tell me?’ Lily demands, when Mara finds her later, shivering by the lake. ‘Why did you lie?’

  Mara sits down on the rock beside her. Lily, furious, turns away.

  ‘I did try to tell you – when you were little. Don’t you remember?’

  Lily shakes her head, wanting to block her ears to Mara’s low, shaky voice.

  ‘You got upset. You didn’t want to hear. You were such a happy little thing and Rowan was such a good dad to you. It was just –’ Mara breaks off with a guilty sigh, ‘oh, easier to let things be. And when you never brought it up again I thought you wanted to forget. Like I did,’ she adds, softly. ‘I only wanted us all to be happy. Time flew and you’ve grown up so fast. Last year you were still a little girl and suddenly you’re not . . . I’m sorry, Lily. I got it all wrong.’

  The guilt in Mara’s voice maddens Lily. The last thing she can deal with right now is her mother’s emotions. Her own are churned up like the lake in a storm.

  And there is a memory of running away, a long time ago, from something she didn’t want to hear. Lily remembers hiding deep in the trees, listening to Mara endlessly calling her name. It was Rowan who found her and gathered her up in his arms and brought her back home where everything was the same as it had always been. He was still her dad and the strange hurt was left buried and forgotten among the trees.

  ‘You were never going to mention it again?’ Lily wrenches away as Mara reaches out to her. ‘I was to live my whole life never knowing who I really am?’

  ‘I always thought we’d talk about it properly one day,’ says Mara. ‘I always meant to, when the time felt right. But these days your moods are all over the place and—’

  ‘So it’s my fault you never told me!’

  That’s not what I mean!’

  Now Mara’s voice is rising. Usually when they flare into a row Rowan will cut in with a joke and they’ll end up laughing instead of squabbling. But he’s not here, and now the thought of the man she loves like a father makes Lily feel strange.

  ‘What’s that?’ says Mara, and the abrupt change in her voice makes Lily look at her mother at last.

  All around the lake the mountains have shrugged off the early mist. Mara is staring at the sky above the southern peaks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That.’

  Now Lily sees a glint of silver moving across the pale sky.

  ‘There’s another.’ Lily points.

  They watch the two silver ships speeding North.

  ‘Sky ships,’ Mara murmurs. ‘Only the sky cities could have such things . . . what are they doing here?’

  Lily’s heart jolts. ‘Scarwell said my father is in a sky city.’

  So Scarwell told you,’ says Mara bitterly.

  She faces he
r daughter and the guilt-clouds in her eyes all burn away.

  ‘I don’t know where he is now,’ Mara says. ‘The sky city of New Mungo was his home. When we broke out of the city he went down to the netherworld.’

  Once again, as she did when she looked at Scarwell’s beast, Lily remembers her people’s stories about the drowned ruins they once fled and tries to picture the strange netherworld beneath the sky city where her unknown father might be.

  ‘Why didn’t he come here with you?’ she wants to know.

  ‘His world sickened him. He had to change it,’ Mara answers. She takes a deep breath. ‘Fox’s grandfather, Caledon – your great-grandfather – founded the empire of sky cities. Caledon was a pioneer of Natural Engineering and he dreamed up the giant cities that saved people from the floods all over the Earth.’

  Mara’s eyes shine as she watches the airships sail across the ocean of sky.

  ‘Caledon was a genius,’ she continues, ‘but brutal, and his empire was too. It shut out the rest of the world. Fox felt he’d be living with blood on his hands if he didn’t try to undo the wrongs of his own family. We were refugees,’ she gestures towards the forest of Candlewood and its people, ‘shut out of the cities with nowhere to live in the world. I found Fox when I was desperate – first through my cyberwizz, Granny Mary’s old computer. Somehow I found him again in the sky city. It felt like a miracle. I fell in love too fast, too young – but Fox and I, we – we had different destinies.’ Mara’s voice is hoarse, breaking now. ‘I had to leave him, Lily. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know until I crossed the ocean that I was pregnant with you.’

  Lily is silent, numb.

  ‘All this,’ she says at last, ‘you kept all this from me?’

  Mara nods, her hands clenched in her lap, knuckles white.

  ‘What else?’ Lily demands as the airships fade into the northern skies. ‘I want to know everything. You haven’t even told me my own father’s name. Fox who?’